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It is not possible to make sure everyone in this country can afford a home without making homes cost less. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to trick you. Home prices have to go down.

Robertson did his Cheshire Cat routine on his first day on the job. A reporter asked the minister: “Do you think home prices need to go down?”

The first word out of Robertson’s mouth said everything: “No.” But he continued: “I think that we need to deliver more supply. Make sure that the market is stable. It’s a huge part of our economy. We need to be delivering more affordable housing.”

Anybody with even a cursory understanding of economics can immediately see the problem in Robertson’s logic pretzel. Over the past two decades, the construction of new housing simply hasn’t kept up with our growing population. That mismatch left about 1.5 million households in need of housing by 2010 — a figure that has skyrocketed past 2.5 million this year,

When demand increases faster than supply, prices go up. And prices have gone up: Home prices have over the last two decades. (If you control for inflation, they’ve still .)��

It is absolutely true that a home is a family’s most valuable asset: But it was never supposed to be their most lucrative investment. Look back through Canadian history and you’ll see that real home prices would rise and fall along with the economy and were based on an abundance or shortage of supply. You were never guaranteed returns. But you could be very confident that your asset’s value would, at the very least, hold steady in the long run. If you wanted to make money in housing, you either needed to build new homes, renovate existing ones, or rent units out.

That changed after the millennium, when housing became a source of wealth generation. Homeowners saw their net worth balloon — and our government and financial system insisted it was all free money.

But someone had to pay for this massive wealth transfer. Millennials had to buy these inflated assets to have a place to live. Many others are living in poverty or on the streets because they couldn’t afford to.

We papered over those problems through intergenerational wealth transfers and federal subsidy programs. This just pitched more money into an overheated market. While millennials may have celebrated getting keys to their new pad, the fact remains that they have gotten the raw end of this deal. Wages grew at just a fraction of the rate of home prices while their debt has become more expensive. 

More than anything, this is unsustainable. We know that those without adequate housing have a quality of life than those happily homed. We know that our housing shortage is the main driver of homelessness and it compounds the drug crisis. Unaffordability makes us less productive, it makes it harder to start a business, and it makes our country more CO2-intensive by requiring more car infrastructure to connect cheaper housing to employment.

We also know that these assets are inflated. A home in Canada is worth considerably more than an identical home in America. If lack of supply is keeping house prices up, it cannot be the government’s job to keep the value of assets artificially inflated.

After facing backlash for his comments, Robertson took to Twitter to respond: “The question I answered was about reducing the price of a family’s current home, which for most Canadians, is their most valuable asset,” Robertson wrote. “The question wasn’t ‘should homes be more affordable?’ Of course they should … I’m focused on what the federal government can and should do to increase the supply and drive down the overall cost of housing.”

That sounds reasonable, at least superficially. But this effort to separate the price of one family’s home from the broader price of a home on the market is nonsensical. If you want to drive down the cost of purchasing a home, you have to also reduce the price of existing homes. If you don’t want to reduce the value of these homes, then you are in fact committing to having demand exceed supply — the very issue that led us to the housing crisis in the first place.

The rhetorical flourish that some, including Robertson, employ is to suggest that we can maintain these inflated prices but lessen the pain by getting people into affordable housing. But in practice, this means maintaining the scarcity of midmarket homes whilst building a different class of lower-value assets. This risks ghettoizing cities and will never be sufficient to address the crisis. We need significantly more affordable housing and apartment buildings, condos, townhouses, bungalows, co-ops, rooming houses, and so on.

And we need to set targets for this supply that outpaces current demand. And, yes, that will mean that home prices decline — it will happen slowly, gradually, and modestly. But that needs to be the goal. It’s the only way to get people off the streets, to boost productivity, incentivize startups, attract talent and provide refugees with both a home and opportunity. Anything less would simply stop the problem from getting worse, not fix it.

Nobody is likely to be thrilled about the prospect of becoming slightly less wealthy, particularly those who are otherwise not wealthy at all. But it is a necessary sacrifice to get the country back on track.

The great news is that Canadians already know this. About Canadians told pollster Nanos that they would be happy for housing prices to go down. 

Politicians are, no doubt, spooked to say this out loud. But that’s why we need politicians with the bravery to say some hard truths. Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, bumped out of the housing portfolio to make room for Robertson, told the Star earlier this year: “It’s not the government’s job to protect a certain amount of equity that has built up in a person’s home.” He’s right. Conservative MP Scott Aitchison was : “Of course prices have to come down.” He’s even more right.

Robertson, on the other hand, is just wrong. What’s particularly worrying about that is Robertson helped write Carney’s housing strategy — a campaign document that is, by nearly every metric, It correctly identifies the need to build more of every kind of home, to get the government back into the business of home construction, and to push cities to legalize more dense communities.

But we must now call into question that entire strategy because the man tasked with implementing it appears to now be suggesting he wouldn’t want it to work too well. And, worse yet, he replaced a minister who was fully aware of what needed to be done to remedy this crisis.

Carney’s plan promises to double home construction, building 500,000 new homes a year. That is a great near-term target, but it cannot be the final goal. Over the last year, Canada’s population grew by nearly 750,000. Even accepting that Carney’s will make this more manageable, this target would put us at least a decade away from solving our acute housing shortage. This target cannot be the end goal, it has to be the beginning.

Robertson has only been on the job for days, but his comments — and his track record — indicate a politician more concerned with protecting the inflated value of some Canadians’ nest eggs than with making sure everyone has a place to call home. If he wants to serve the entire country, he needs to come out and say it: Home prices have to go down.